Catherine Shepard Bloomer is a literary scholar specializing in Italian literature and critical disability studies. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Brandeis University and an Assistant Editor of Digital Dante. She previously held the Florence Levy Kay Fellowship in Premodern Disability Studies in the Departments of Classical & Early Mediterranean Studies and English at Brandeis, and has served as Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in Italian Studies at Villanova University.
Catherine received her Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, along with a certificate from the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, & Sexuality. Her doctoral work examined how Dante conceptualizes physical disability within theological, medical, and civic frameworks. At Columbia, she taught in both the Italian Department and the Core Curriculum, where she received the Preceptor Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate instruction.
Her research focuses on the medieval and early modern Mediterranean and its intellectual connections to Europe. She studies how premodern literary texts theorize embodiment, care, gender, and ethical vulnerability through medical, devotional, and social-historical frameworks. Her current book project, Blameless Defect: A Dantean Model of Disability, argues that Dante articulates an ethics of care that treats disability as a morally neutral and relational condition rather than a sin or deficit. By engaging medieval medicine, devotional culture, and civic history, the project demonstrates how disability structures poetic meaning and ethical reasoning in Dante’s works and milieu.
In addition to her work on Dante, Catherine is engaged in digital-humanities research as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Petrarch in Global Translation initiative. Her project, “Disabled Love: Petrarchism and the Global Poetics of Embodied Disruption,” uses close reading, TEI encoding, and inclusive digital design to trace metaphors of disability across Petrarch’s lyric corpus and its global translations.
Catherine also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The New School, where she co-founded the arts education program WriteOn NYC and later served as Associate Director. She graduated cum laude from Barnard College with a B.A. in Italian and English literature and studied at the Università di Bologna during her undergraduate career.